Rawblood

by Catriona Ward

  A great stillness came over him and he resumed, she thought, his cat-stance; watching her. ‘We come now to it,’ he said.

  She said, ‘Go on, sir.’

  ‘You tell me that I am cold,’ said Don Villarca. ‘You say that I am cloaked in despair. All this is true. I have led what people call a sinful life. I think that all my virtue is dried up, withered away. Sometimes I walk through it in my dreams – the interior of my heart. It is like a black land, where black flags hang in tatters and venomous plants grow in sickly clumps and serpents writhe … A deadly night-garden, my heart.’

  ‘I know it,’ she said. Her breath came a little faster.

  ‘But,’ said Don Villarca. ‘I have seen your heart too, Miss Hopewell, and it is just like mine.’ His words smote Mary like a blow. She burned within. ‘All your beauty cannot hide it,’ he said. ‘Downcast eyes, meticulous correctness; a decorous manner cannot hide it; the great black hole where hope should be, where life should be. You say that you see the darkness in me. I see it mirrored in you. I know your emptiness.’

  ‘I will not be spoken to thus,’ she said, ‘by a man who—’

  ‘What? What, Miss Hopewell, have I done? Nothing that you know of! But you feel it – the great cavern within me. Because like calls to like, always. Will you deny it?’ he said, his hand urgent on her arm. The light in his arrow-slit eyes. ‘Will you deny that we are the same?’

  ‘You are a villain,’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘We are both villains.’

  Mary could not move, for the world had tilted for ever on its axis.

  ‘I have no one,’ Don Villarca said. ‘All of my family is dead. Their deaths were terrible, each one. Madre de dios. I am alone, and rotten with memory. You too are alone, Miss Hopewell. We are wasted, both, we are sickened by loss. Perhaps sorrow has taken the virtue out of us for ever, has corrupted us utterly. Perhaps it cannot be recovered … Will you refute me again? Will you—’

  ‘No, I will not deny it,’ said Mary Hopewell, exhausted. Tears rose burning to her eyes – she let them fall. A great opprobrious weight had been lifted. ‘We are the same. I felt it. I feel it.’ The power, the strange peril of the moment swept through her – the enormity of being known. His hand was cool on the back of her neck.

  ‘You have never known freedom,’ said Don Villarca. ‘Ladies are meant to be cut from different cloth. They are not supposed to want, to know certain things. And I – I have never known peace, or affection. Perhaps we are not villains at all. There has been no opportunity to discover what we might be.’ His voice sounded a note of infinite longing. Mary’s hand found his. Their fingers intertwined lightly, and in that slight touch she felt it – the aching tug of the possible. Years, a life …

  Mary tore from his grasp. ‘It is not settled,’ she said. ‘Villain I may be, but I will not do what you ask. The bargain is too bad. I must warn you off it. If only you knew! Your family is lost to violence, and madness – but the Hopewells die young, also. Like the Villarcas, we murdered each other merrily, we fought duels, and we died, yes we died plentifully … Then when we lost our home, we were scattered. One by one we fell victim to disease … You speak of the blood, the curse of the Villarcas, but in truth the Hopewells are no less damned … it is a sad history, best ended. I am the last of my name and I am not long for this world. For these reasons and – oh! – a hundred more, I will not give you the answer you seek, sir.’

  He said, ‘We will agree on this, in the end. I have conceived such a passion for you and I am very clever at getting what I want. Perhaps this will be my most monstrous act – to take from you your life.’

  ‘Odd,’ she said, ‘I care not for that.’ She shook her head; her eyes held a resolve which was his answer: no.

  He seized Mary’s hand in a light grip and leant into her ear, so that his words filled those spaces with his breath. ‘Nel ciel che più de la sua luce prende,’ said Don Villarca, ‘fu’io, e vidi cose che ridire, né sa né può chi di là sù discende …’3 If you marry me, you shall do precisely what you will. There is nothing which I would not understand. Whatever you wish – whatever you desire – it shall be yours before you have finished the thought. I will make it my life’s work. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Paradiso,’ Mary said lightly. ‘A paradoxical freedom; one which is permitted, granted by another … I must go.’

  ‘Stop,’ said Don Villarca, agonised. ‘I know, I know, I have done it so very badly. I should have begun like this.’ He drew from the white silken lining of his coat a sheaf of papers.

  Miss Hopewell smiled. ‘Sir—’

  ‘Please,’ he said, ‘read.’

  She scanned the first lines; the next page and the next, lifting the leaves with unsteady fingers. Her lips moved silently. Her heart beat against her ribs like a child with a stick on the railings.

  ‘It took me some time to find it,’ said Don Villarca. ‘It was travelling in disguise, as Dempsey House. Who are these Dempseys? It will not do. So if you will have it, I will take you home to Rawblood. I do not hold everything cheap,’ he said. ‘I can discern what is infinitely rare, and must be grasped. Say what you choose; give me what answer you will; send me away. But do not,’ said Don Villarca, ‘ever again think that I do not see to the heart of you.’ His face, habitually so watchful and elegant, now brimmed with feeling and with anxiety.

  ‘You do not know what you have done,’ said Mary, ‘and I will have it—’ She passed one hand across her brow, which was hot. The other clutched to her chest the deeds to the house. ‘As soon as may be. I care not for …’ She left the thought unfinished; her face bore the inattentive look of one who listens to a sound, far away. ‘You should take William Shakes home to Devon,’ she said. ‘He misses it.’

  Don Villarca smiled. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He does. And you?’ Mary did not speak at once, but seized his face in her pale hands and looked. She looked truly and long. He looked back without artifice, without pride. She saw the tired soldier within.

  ‘To agree,’ said Mary, ‘only to abandon you, in, what? One year? Two? It is merciless of me, and cruel. What is your name?’

  ‘Leopoldo,’ he said, squeezing his bright almond eyes closed with distaste. ‘Is it not dreadful?’

  ‘Dreadful,’ she said. ‘I am Mary.’ She stopped, puzzled. ‘I had thought, oh, so many things …’ She had a growing hilarity in her; she looked at him and it rose, it thrust against the dam. ‘All along I thought you truly a villain – as if we were caught in the plot of some play …’ Her mirth reached its peak like a stream in spate and she laughed. ‘I mistook it for horror but it was merely love, in the end.’

  ‘It is, perhaps, quite an easy mistake,’ said Don Villarca. ‘Your answer?’

  What was there left to say? For the first time, circumstance marched together with the dictates of her heart.

  He left in the twilight. Mary rose and went to the house. She found Miss Brigstocke standing by the garden door to the parlour. She did not seem to note Miss Hopewell, she was pale and trembling; her eyes were wet currants. In one hand she held a withered red bloom. In the other she held, betwixt her fingers, a thin band of old gold adorned with rubies and diamonds.

  Miss Brigstocke was whispering. ‘Lav hi azar, yak, alazas, b’or, amria. Ai! Ai ai, johai,’ she said on a low breath. Her eyes were blank. ‘… Beng tasser tute! Detlene. Ladzav, ladzav, ladzav! Jekh dilo kerel dile hai but dile keren dilimata.’4

  Miss Hopewell looked on her with a cautious eye. Hephzibah was a stranger to her now. She made to pass the other woman into the house. As she did Miss Brigstocke seized her arm in an iron grip.

  ‘You see? I have it; the flower,’ said Miss Brigstocke. ‘I have also your ring, which was in your reticule. It was not lost. You have practised a low deception upon me. You lured him to us, like a common … a common …’

  Miss Hopewell regarded Miss Brigstocke. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose that I did.’

  ‘But you despise him,’ said Miss
Brigstocke. ‘You fear him.’

  ‘I thought so,’ said Mary. ‘But I have been so very wrong.’ She smiled a little to herself.

  ‘But we made a compact, you and I,’ Miss Brigstocke said. ‘We are to face it out together … Mary.’ She began to weep; great, broken sobs. ‘I thought you constant. I thought us friends.’

  Mary breathed deep, her eyes as bright as children’s marbles. ‘Such pity for yourself, Hephzibah,’ she said. ‘And yet I heard something most strange. That day, as I slept, I dreamt I heard you below, with Don Villarca; two voices were raised at one another; you spoke of me. A dream, I thought! When I asked you of it you told me as much. I called myself a madwoman, and chastised myself for it, after. But let us be frank. He came; and you sent him away, told him I would not survive marriage, or children. Is this not so?’

  Miss Brigstocke wept bitterly and openly. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘It is so.’

  ‘Did you wish for my small capital,’ said Mary, ‘so very much?’ They looked at one another. Miss Hopewell shrugged and turned to go.

  Miss Brigstocke drew breath. She dashed the tears from her eyes. ‘Stop, Mary. There is something … For the sake of what we were, I must tell you. As I held your ring, moments ago, between my fingers, the sight came upon me. I have never felt such living evil. This marriage will bring sickness and death. It will lay waste to generations. It will grow black flowers in the black land … You will not live. I beg you, I implore you, do not do what you intend …’

  Miss Hopewell stilled her with a hand. ‘No more, madam,’ she said, ‘of your cant and your stratagems. You may be right; those words which you uttered in duplicity may easily be true. Perhaps I will not live.

  ‘But no matter what might come, I am resolved that I will forge my own existence. No longer will I be pushed, and pulled, and cosseted, and lied to. Damn you.

  ‘In short, Miss Brigstocke, I find that you have been speaking for me, where you had not the shadow of a right to do it. You pretend to protect my interests; but it is only to further your own advantage.’ Here Mary Hopewell drew a long breath, and when she spoke next her voice was weighted with unshed tears. ‘You speak of deception,’ she said, ‘but it is I who have been the most deceived; that is, in you. But there it is, and no longer of consequence.’

  She plucked the ring from Miss Brigstocke’s cold fingers and went past her into the dark house.

  ‘Lashav!’ called Miss Brigstocke as she went. ‘Your future is dark, and long. Longer than you suppose. Lashav, lashav, lashav!’5

  Miss Hopewell did not look back.

  ‘Curse you, then,’ called Miss Brigstocke after her. Then to the empty air, ‘I have tried to turn it aside.’

  The following morning Mary awoke to a sense of something reordered, of a vacancy in the pattern of things. She lay, still half in the grip of her dream, which had been bright and violently coloured, involving long swathes of flowing cloth which stretched like roads into the distance … She turned her head upon the pillow and felt how pleasant it was. Her hair, unbound, was smooth beneath her shoulders; she rolled gently to and fro upon it, thinking of nothing much. But what was it?

  In the street beyond, doors were opening for the business of the day. Horses passed by, hooves rang on the beaten earth. Birds made shrill retorts. From the kitchen below there came the familiar singing of the dented kettle, the drag of Gabriela’s slippers along the boards, her quiet, murderous muttering.

  No sound came from the room adjoining Mary’s. There was none of Miss Brigstocke’s high and tuneless humming, or the creaking of her ancient and torturous stays. Through the wall was a silent space. Hephzibah had gone from the house. When? In the night? It would be quite gothic, to flee in the dark. But gone she was; Mary felt it. The very air was changed; the quality of the light which came through the shutters, the shafts of winter sun laid straight along the floor. Mary looked around her little room with its dusty corners, the dark beams which seeped an astringent, resinous scent, the worn rag carpet, once green, now washed pale grey. Somewhere a mouse made a drowsy scratching sound. The scene had an irresolute quality, as of something imperfectly remembered. She could not feel anything about it.

  The pillow beneath her head was white, unsullied. Mary looked at it for a time, wondering. Suddenly she drew a deep, sharp breath, filling her lungs. The air flowed in a clean cool stream. I am very well, she thought. It was too big a thing for so small a feeling as surprise. Her life’s companion had left her. It seemed right, and inevitable that it be so. It is true. We are healed by Rawblood. This thought was followed in that instant by others which travelled through her like fatigue, like warmth: he will come again today. And I am going home … The feeling that pierced her then was like light.

  Mary stands before the window, upright as a wand, the floor cool and solid beneath the soles of her feet. She throws the shutters open to the blinding day, raises her arms above her head and stretches herself wide and high, lifting onto the tips of her toes as dancers do. She throws her arms out; broadening, lengthening into a star. She tips her head back and yawns wide.

  1 ‘Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark/For the straightforward pathway had been lost.’ Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, Canto I.

  2 ‘Help, please! We beg you to take us to Siena!’

  3 ‘Within that heaven which most his light receives/Was I, and things beheld which to repeat/Nor knows, nor can, who from above descends.’ Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, Canto I.

  4 Her name is a flower, an eye, a flame, the woman, the curse … I see the ghost’s vomit. The devil strangle you! The souls of dead children. Shame, shame, shame! Madmen make more madmen, which makes madness.

  5 Shame, shame, shame!

  1850

  Far Deeping, Lincolnshire

  The woman who grasped his sleeve in Church Street was near starving. Her bones turned up in her face like the edges of saucers.

  ‘Reverend,’ she said. She regarded him with berry-black eyes that were sunken and dull. She gathered her voluminous garment about her. It was of grey flannel, stained all about, and frayed sadly. The morning wind licked at the holes.

  Reverend Comer sighed inwardly and prepared himself for exposition.

  ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘I am as you see in somewhat of a hurry. If there is something of a spiritual nature which you require from me, let’s have it. Otherwise I must refer you to the Magdalene House on Union Street, where you will find assistance of the kind you seek.’

  At this the woman bristled. She drew herself up and stared, and in that moment he recognised her. It was of course too late to recall his words.

  ‘Reverend Comer,’ said Miss Brigstocke, ‘I do not quite understand.’ Her tone said that she understood perfectly.

  ‘My dear Miss Brigstocke! My word. What a charming surprise! I was thinking of something else entirely – and – and speaking quite at random you know. Er, forgive me. The cares laid upon the shoulders of the clergy … And I was not expecting to see an old friend! But what were we saying?’

  ‘We had not yet begun to say anything, sir.’ A strand of grey hair whipped across her face. She pushed it aside, seeming close to tears.

  ‘Which will not do!’ he said, desperate. ‘Will you not take some tea with me for the sake of old times? It would give me great pleasure.’

  ‘Well,’ said Miss Brigstocke, delicately, ‘let us see. What is the clock? Yes, oh I see. Well, I need not call before eleven, so …’ He stood patiently through the performance. At last she said, ‘And of course it would be a shame to miss the opportunity of hearing all that you have been about. It has been ten years?’ He judged then that pride had been satisfied, and ushered her across the cobbles.

  Once inside the Rose Miss Brigstocke’s colour improved. She laid her grey flannel sack gently on the chair beside her, revealing a dress, perhaps once black, now the murky green of deep water. It was patched here and there with cambric of various colours and red striped linen which gave he
r the appearance of a moulding deckchair on a promenade. She had no hat. Her hair waved about her like a shock of dried grass. The Rose was half full, and he could see at a far table Mrs Munn, who had the haberdashery shop, and her daughter. They stared with round eyes, mouths busy behind their teacups. He waved and they raised slow wondering hands in return. It would be all over Far Deeping by the afternoon.

  He ordered tea, cake and sandwiches. Looking at her thin lips, which struggled over pointed brown teeth, he called after the girl, ‘Also macaroons!’ Miss Brigstocke sat quiet with her hands folded in her lap as this part of the business was done. A scent came from her, not quite of the gutter, but strong and fermented. The reverend wished once again that she had not chanced to see him. He liked things to be comfortable; Miss Brigstocke and her state were so uncomfortable. He waited, but saw that she would not begin.

  ‘Well!’ he said. ‘I am sure there is much to say. I am surprised, I own, to find you in England.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I have been back in the country for some while. I left Italy, you know, that very same year that we met there.’

  ‘Indeed! It seems a pity. You and Miss Hopewell had made such a cosy life together!’

  She smiled but her eyes were on the tray of cakes, which arrived that moment.

  He took three immediately on to his plate, in order that she should feel she could do the same. ‘Home shores are best, Miss Brigstocke! But I expect you do not regret your adventure, for travel is so enlarging.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Most pleasant and enlarging.’

  ‘And what brings you to Far Deeping? Are you placed in the area?’ He sincerely hoped not. He thought of the inevitable obligation. She was neither a respectable person, nor a charity case. It was so awkward. Would Mrs Comer be expected to invite her to dine? And that odour … It was something like a cat, or a stoat.